'Being inside any social or historical moment is like being tossed into a crazed tumble-drier,' Tom Paulin wrote in an essay on the postwar Polish writer Tadeusz Rozewicz. Another essay, filching a phrase from T.S. Eliot, speaks of 'the desperate sleeplessness of the historical sense'. Both bear on his spectacularly strange new book.

Paulin is probably best known as the curmudgeonly Samson Agonistes of the Late Review. He is also an impassioned critical essayist and the author of five books of poetry. His poetry and criticism show the same pugnacious commitment to a political and vernacular version of literature.

The title poem of his previous book, The Wind Dog (1999), a straggling autobiographical essay in poetics, was a cento of unravelling quotations from Frost, MacNeice, John Clare and others. It provides the technical cue to his hugely ambitious The Invasion Handbook, which is made up, as he says, of 'Orts and scraps torn stamps bits of debris/ staled by other men and women/ more random than the nicks on a tallystick'.

In it, Paulin feels inside what he calls the 'slippery' and 'drecky sack' of time and comes up with a tissue of pungent quotations. The result is a giddy series of close-ups of diplomatic, intellectual and military history from 1919 to 1940, taking us from the Treaty of Versailles, through Weimar, the Treaty of Locarno, the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, to the Battle of Britain.

Described variously as a 'looseleaf epic', a 'cultural primer', and a 'history lesson', this bewildering brantub of European political history is the weirdest expression yet of Paulin's polemical 'historical sense'. Reading it is very much like being inside that crazed tumble-drier.

But if Paulin likes his history dry, he also likes it dirty. The Prologue has the poet sucking 'a tiny bit of gunge', announcing the poet's genially gunge-ho approach to his material. Early in this 200-page collage, he pays tribute to the dadaist Schwitters's 'cathedral/ of erotic misery', made up of 'string', 'grease' and 'shite'.

More overtly political than Schwitters, Paulin homes in on the stains on and around the political and poetic texts of the period that he cannibalises, from the Treaty of Versailles and Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace to The Waste Land, a poem written in their shadow.

In his previous book, Paulin had a poem about TS Eliot's 'fear and hatred of all Jews', and from the second poem in the new one, TS Eliot is a prime source and target, in particular his notorious anti-Semitic poem 'Gerontion' with its lower-case 'jew'. Compounding 'Gerontion' and The Waste Land, Paulin refers tetchily to 'Christ the Tiger/ in the juvescence - wrong springy word/ of the year/ the cruel time of the year', and a little afterwards, in a Keynesean attack on the treaty as 'the death sentence of many millions', to The Waste Land as the work of 'another American in Europe, like Woodrow Wilson' with a 'banal, consoling message': 'After such knowledge, we neither know nor practise forgiveness.'

For Eliot in 'Gerontion', 'History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors', and the way Paulin cunningly smuggles in passages from Eliot into his snowballing historical cento suggests we might read it as a sustained rebuff to the reactionary politics of Eliot, the canonical modernist collagiste.

There are occasional historical footnotes, but most readers will probably find themselves in the dark much of the time. A rare footnote explains that 'Locarno' refers to the 1925 treaty for example but explains none of the flurry of literary associations involving Joyce, Yeats and others, in the three poems under that title. Readers without a grasp of the original materials might be baffled when Churchill is described in terms of Yeats's Caesar, 'spreading maps in a tent' but Yeats's 'A Long-Legged Fly' is a recurrent mapping point.

We are told The Invasion Handbook is only 'the first instalment' of an 'ambitious new poem about the Second World War', and Paulin's spots of time involve a starry cast. Literary texts, political treaties and architect's plans are all grist to the same mill, as political figures like Hitler, Chamberlain and Stalin change places in this dance to the music of history with intellectuals like Heidegger, Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin and Martha Gellhorn. The result is a poem of rare intellectual reach and daring. It is full, though, of the sound of familiar bees buzzing in Paulin's bonnet.

Though we move confusingly between innumerable first person voices from other texts we are never far from the Paulin who writes: 'Samson in the temple/ is what it feels like.' In fact, a handful of the best poems concern the poet's own dubious relationship to his historical material. One of them, 'Nanking', shows him 'reach for the zapper/ caught between one guilt/ and another'. Caught up in this strange anti-Eliot spin-drier, the bewildered reader may not learn much history but is left to ponder the frictional music of Paulin's bees. Perhaps all will become clearer in the next instalment.